


Cello Suite No. 1

by notabadday



Category: The West Wing, West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-04
Updated: 2012-09-04
Packaged: 2017-11-13 13:39:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/504096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notabadday/pseuds/notabadday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What can you say about a thirty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved politics and trivia, Yo-Yo Ma, and me?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cello Suite No. 1

_What can you say about a thirty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved politics and trivia, Yo-Yo Ma, and me?_

I must have listened to her voicemail a hundred times already. “This is Donna Moss, leave a message.” It’s the present tense of it, cutting a new wound upon every echo. Because she’s dead. Her lifeline perfectly horizontal, running unstoppably in the other direction. Every breath I take is another in the wake of hers. She was supposed to be okay. She woke up and she talked to me and we were Josh and Donna again, just for a little while. So, how can she be gone now? I find it impossible to catch a breath.  

 I’m unsure of my next breath, unconcerned about whether it’ll ever come. It seems as though the ground beneath me has given way, detaching me from any sense of balance. The skillfully sewn stitches with which I was held together have come undone.

 “This is Donna Moss, leave a message.” Her voice is melodic, peaceful, upbeat. It’s the only version of Donna I can remember. I imagine sepia tone projections of her against the cold, empty wall of the hospital; I picture her radiant smile and the elegant line of her shoulders as her head turns to me, expertly exposed when her hair was tied up and perfectly teased when it was down. In this image, it’s loosely down. The more I think of her, the more angelic she becomes. How had she ever been real? How is it possible that she’s been with me all this time?

 Eventually I find my voice. “Donna, it’s Josh.” Quivering, vulnerable with grief that overcomes me, I sound childish and broken. A few more attempts later, I continue. “Listen… this isn’t… I need you back.” It’s difficult to swallow away the lumps in my throat that keep ferociously coming. “There is too much I didn’t tell you, too much you didn’t get to do. I didn’t let you do enough, you’re right. I need you to come back so that I can make it right. Otherwise… nothing will ever be right again, will it? So…” I was a hopeless case, writhing my head desperately as though looking to shake away the truth. “I don’t know… how to… live, without you.”

 I move the phone to my chest, pressing redial episodically so that the voice of my better angel can call to me, a peaceful correspondence delivered directly to a broken heart. Tears don’t fall down my face, resolutely swelling in my eyes without the ability to journey my skin. Every muscle in my body aches, for her. It is impossible to move, even just to blink.

 I’ve waited too long. I’ve waited too long. All I can think is that for some inexplicable reason, that escaped me in the moment, I have waited much too long. She deserved to know how deeply, wholly, overwhelmingly loved she was. Three words that all mean the same thing. But she deserved to hear them all. All of those shitty lines in movies that she made sense of, she deserved to hear them.

 I recall some of our recent conversations. She wanted to do more. Guilt overwhelms me. All the time I’ve known her, she’s had such an undeserved inferiority complex. It had been my job, should have been my contribution to tell her she was important. Every day, I should have told her. She’s not an ‘also dead’. She’s not my assistant. She should have been able to stay during the shutdown. She’s my partner. She’s the stitches that hold me together. She’s the air in my lungs. How will any of this make sense without her?

 More self-absorbedly, I wonder how I will ever be able to forgive myself. When I came, she was okay. When I left, she died.

 It was only a couple of hours, but I shouldn’t have left. She died without knowing that I loved her. Now, with the projection of my imagination fading, she appears to me opaque through an ivory lace veil, and I know. I know then what should have been. Her face is deliciously serene, a quiet contentment evident in the corners of her mouth. She coyly reveals a smile as she fades out of focus, constantly moving further away from me while I am consumed by my desire to reach inside myself to get to her.

 There’s an obscene strangeness to my mind or my heart, or the two of them conspiring together, being the only place I can find her. It’s as though she’s been forced into some caged existence within me, and stripped of the freedom she had been longing for.

 We were one. We were one from the moment we met, in an intertwined-souls kind of a way. We never needed this to be forced upon us.

 How is it possible that I have been this stupid? I spend every day of my life living in fear that someone close to me will die, but I never imagined that person could be Donna. Donna, my angel. Donna, sent down to us to make us all better. Better people and better healed. I find myself understanding Christianity a little better. Now that she’s not here, all I can think of is her captivating beauty and her innocent heart, swelling with compassion. She changed my life. With her angelic grace, she made me a little more human. I can’t think of a single reason why she put up with me, though.

 Me, who works her a double day. Me, who treats her like an ill-trained puppy. Me, who uses her as a sounding board. Me, who never told her.

 Come back. Just, come back to me.

 I consider what’s left to do. I have nowhere to go. I am in Germany, completely alone now. Donna’s mother is going to land soon and I will have to tell her. But, I’m alone. I am helplessly floating, too far from the world to ever find gravity again. I wonder if I’ll cry when I tell Donna’s mother, or when Leo offers me condolences or perhaps at the funeral. Right now, it doesn’t feel like the water that glosses over my eyes will ever befall my cheeks.

 Suddenly, I have an idea. It makes me run like a madman back to the hospital room that I had last seen her in. The stains from the mess on the floor are the only resemblance of my last sight of the room. But, on the side cabinet there is a plastic bag of items that came with her to the hospital. It’s very little, but I need it. I need anything of Donna’s I can find because I’m so far from home, so far from Donna and all alone. I need something to pull my head above water, just long enough.

 Inside the plastic bag, I find a familiar light beige shoulder bag that I recognise as Donna’s. It’s ruined. I feel emotional once more at the symbolism of this one possession of Donna’s that I’ve found being so utterly charred. My curiosity encourages me to search a little more and I find that a few of the items in her bag, despite its state, seem to have held up relatively unscathed. In one of the pockets-inside-pockets, I discover a light pink sock. It’s on its own, and when I pick it up, I find it weighted by something small but hard. Donna’s iPod slides out.

 I clench a fist around it for a moment, holding it like it’s Donna shrunk down to fit in my palm. I can’t explain what it is that makes me act so desperately lost, as though inanimate objects are going to provide navigation. I take an even tighter grasp of the iPod, and nothing else, and walk out of the hospital to find a nearby park. It’s not a nice park. There’s no fountain or anything.

 It’s cold, but I barely feel it. Everything outside of the bubble of grief that consumes me is irrelevant. I sit alone on the bench, to one side of it as though someone else is going to sit down.

 I place the headphones in my ears, not bothering with the knotted wires. I don’t know what’s on her iPod, or what it is that I’m hoping for so I just press for the shuffle. There’s a part of me, caught up in hope, that truly believes she’s going to see me and choose the song that I need to hear. Perhaps no matter what it is, I can find a way to make it her.

 Then it starts to play.

 My head hangs back as my body numbly lies over the bench, devoid of strength. She is playing it to me; Cello Suite No.1, by Yo-Yo Ma. I feel myself start convulsing. I clutch my chest desperately. I don’t know whether it’s the memory of the hot lead bullet firing through my skin or my heart shattering inside my body, but it’s a pain like nothing I’ve experienced before. Now that I’m finally feeling something, though, it’s better. I don’t know whether it’s real or not but I’m closer to Donna. That’s all that matters now.

 I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, awakening me from my self-absorbed haze of anguish. I reluctantly pull it out, still clutching my chest with my other hand. It’s a text from CJ. It reads as a long chain of apologies, condolences, words that won’t change anything. And then, “She made you decent, and in return you made her so, so happy.”

 Only now do I realize that in every memory that I could draw of Donna earlier, that ear-to-ear smile was a constant. Subconsciously, I’d erased the bad days because they were so few, and so irrelevant. She was a contented person, despite the fact that she was single and she worked for me. And when I consider how that could be, I let myself believe that CJ might just be right. A guilty shard falls from the pane of grief that shielded my heart.

 I draw my hand up to my face and I feel fragile lines form beneath both my eyes and against my palm is the dampness of relief. My eyelashes are weighed down by the faint droplets I weep for Donna. I can see again, my eyes in better focus, no longer a dam of tears. The sound of the cello vacillates between soothing and distressing. I wait for the piece to end, and when it does I don’t know what to feel. I miss her. The pain in my chest lingers, but I manage to dismiss it. I suddenly feel conscious that she’s watching me now, and in case she’s being all judgmental about how self-pitying I’m being, I stiffen up my posture. In case she’s worrying about me, I calm myself down enough to find a steady rhythm of breath.

 The truth is, she’s neither. She’s just gone.

  _What can you say about a thirty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved politics and trivia, Yo-Yo Ma, and me?_

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is very welcome.


End file.
